Monday, February 02, 2009

Political hypocrisy watch - Zimbabwe edition

Misleading, disingenuous, hypocritical, and outright dishonest formulations--often drawing on a standardized grab-bag of mystifying rhetorical clichés and polite fictions--are a normal part of political and diplomatic discourse, like it or not. It makes sense to get angry or exasperated about them, but it's usually foolish to get too astonished. But every once in a while an example comes along that so thoroughly turns reality upside-down (or inside-out) that it's worth taking notice.

Norman Geras calls our attention to one recent example that really does take one's breath away ... though if one doesn't actually think about it, it sounds like nothing more than the sort of normal diplo-blather to which we're supposed to nod our heads approvingly.

(And the interesting thing is that the person who uttered this howler, South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, may not have fully realized that he was--how shall we put this delicately?--lying. I suspect that there was an element of self-deception here, of the sort that is facilitated by unthinkingly repeating those standard phrases.)

We are more keen to take our cue from the people of Zimbabwe themselves ... rather than try to impose on them our own solutions.

That is more or less the opposite of the truth. It is, as one might say, the wrong way round. The agreement backs Robert Mugabe in ignoring the result of last year's elections in Zimbabwe and colludes in the 'solution' he then imposed on the country by violence.

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research, He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)